Systems employing numerous devices often require or otherwise benefit from the ability for these devices to communicate with one another. While each device may have its own purpose and responsibilities, they may need to transmit information to, and/or receive information from, other devices of the system. Device-to-device communication may be accomplished by wiring the devices together, and communicating via the wires. Systems today are continually moving towards wireless communication, which generally makes installation more convenient, and among other things provides greater flexibility and scalability.
A drawback to wireless communication is that information transfer is not confined to a wire, as in a direct wired system. Rather, the information is transmitted over the air, and transmissions from neighboring systems can interfere with system communications. To address this issue, wireless network systems have employed various methods of transmitting radio signals, such as frequency hopping. Frequency hopping generally refers to a modulation technique where the signal carrier is rapidly switched among many frequency channels. Each party to the communication must know the frequency hopping sequence in order to know when it is to transmit at a certain frequency in the sequence. Using the frequency hopping sequence, transmitting devices can properly address targeted devices, and receiving devices can reject information from neighboring devices that are not within their system but within their reception range.
In systems employing multiple transmitting devices, it is possible for multiple messages to be sent to a receiving device(s) concurrently. For example, if all transmitting and receiving devices communicate information based on the same frequency hopping sequence, two or more transmitting devices can transmit messages on the same frequency channel at the same time. This can cause in collisions, resulting in a failure of some or all of the messages to be properly received at their destination.
If a collision situation occurs where the message(s) did not successfully reach their destination, subsequent attempts to send the same message may experience the similar collision problems. For example, where multiple transmitting devices having the same frequency hopping sequence transmit messages that collide, subsequently retransmitted messages may again be transmitted at the same frequency which can result in a further collision.
Accordingly, there is a need in the communications industry for a manner of wirelessly communicating messages in an orderly fashion, while accounting for collisions. The present invention fulfills these and other needs, and offers other advantages over the prior art.